Internet Marketing is not "Writing"

The difficult reality of Substack and who it attracts. (SEO, market, success on Substack, "6-7 figures Substack", "transform your life", “Why I’m moving to Substack")

I’m not going to make myself popular with this.

But if I see another post titled, “Why I’m moving to Substack” I’m going to throw up.

You’re moving to Substack because $$$. You think it offers an easier and better way of making money than whatever you’re doing currently. Just be honest about it.

I didn’t really follow the growth of Substack particularly closely. I would read about it now and again. I got the impression it appealed to a lot of people including journalists, intellectuals and various experts who accepted it quite earnestly as an alternative less restricted platform.

That impression hasn’t turned out to be the full picture.

Understanding Substack

My experience with Substack as purely a technology has been mostly positive, but I now realise Substack is an internet marketing platform. It’s basically Wordpress or Blogger with direct payments attached and more emphasis on email lists. It’s not a secret either, Substack is quite explicit about it.

On any new platform there is an early adopter phenomenon— where people populate content in an otherwise empty space. And there is no reason to assume Substack was immune to this.

It doesn't mean the content is the greatest. It just means this content fills a void on a relatively sparse growing platform, where the platform is generating more publicity for itself than it can deploy material to be consumed.

This early content accrues a kind of unearned authority or presence simply through being first, even if it’s hard to determine what its objective value is. Nobody really notices too much.

I admit to being puzzled how Substack seems to have so many women no one has heard of, claiming to make 6 figure sums from talking about writing or their writing career (aka their blog while they were overseas). I mean how many female writers talking about writing and doing book reviews does the world actually need?

Ok well, that’s for someone else, not me, fine. But I must have been naive, as I was surprised to find the ratio of outspoken dissenters and brave voices Substack promised us to other stuff was so poor.

Still perhaps Substack is attracting a slightly slicker kind of white noise than the platforms that preceded it like Blogger and Wordpress because people are hoping to make money directly, so they put more effort into it. They are hoping for an extra source of income (fine), writing career (dubious) or they are using Substack explicitly for their own raw internet marketing (poison).

And it’s the raw internet marketing, a particularly destructive kind of anti-content that seems to hold way too much sway on Substack from what I’ve seen so far.

It is likely it’s also acting as a highly negative influence on regular writing, writers and their writing choices too, and we’ll come back to that at the end of this article.

Internet Marketing

By internet marketing, I don’t mean the person running a real business who wants to create some publicity for his business. That’s not what I mean. It’s perfectly fine to make some free content with value and link to your business or website or whatever.

I’m not talking about offering a product of your own online. Even for example, in the case of the supplement industry which has a bad reputation as full of scum, there are a few people who sell their own supplements who I think are decent people. So you can’t define it like that absolutely either.

I’m not talking about paid posts on Substack as a decisive criteria either. In theory it’s totally possible to create good organic content on some subject that people want to pay for and that they get something out of.

What I mean by internet marketing are people creating worthless and unreadable articles packed with referral sales links and people selling you the idea of success.

This is the anti-content I’m talking about and it never goes away. It just gets repackaged again, given new gloss, new manufactured puff and spun out again by the same lying sacks of shit offering themselves as lifestyle and success gurus.

These types will almost certainly be talking about making a lot of money on Substack itself (and platform-specific success is a common theme for marketers) and they will give you the impression they are incredibly successful, and they just want to share that success with you.

They may say they ran different businesses, that they had an amazing career, that they made a ton of money trading or on crypto, but now they want to “settle down” a bit to share these secrets with you right here on Substack.

I suppose you could take some guess based on paid content and numbers of subs, but does anyone really know who makes “six or seven figures on Substack” other than the authors and Substack?

If it were based on comments, I suspect some of the Substacks that give the impression of earning a lot of money don’t –but that may not be a good measure. People seem to comment and engage far less on Substack overall.

Instead Substack seems to be successful at funneling people more toward non-interactive patterns. There’s no real debates on Substack itself like Twitter.

Are you a Substack marketer ?

If you're posting stuff about “how to make it in 2023”, “how to earn 6 or 7 figures on Substack”, how “it's a choice to work or not” you're a marketer and a grifter taking advantage of an infinite supply of morons.

In between that if you insert pseudo-moralising appeals like, “just fucking help others”, “how you treat the waiter tells me who you are” it seems you’re tailoring your grift to what you perceive as a more professional, probably liberal audience on Substack to get them to drop their guard.

But it’s what’s at the end of your posts that matter:

“By the way, just take two minutes to fill out this form and try this new service.

Or,

“I keep getting questions about my webinars for success in 2023. Here’s some info on that…”

(Just ignore any doubts in the back of your mind that no one ought to give a crap about a webinar from someone who has done nothing but buy some crypto once.)

If you're on the other side of this, consuming this stuff daily like a demented weasel, strongly considering stopping rather than feeding this rotting brain cancer.

You are not going to transform yourself by reading some stupid meme then clicking his crappy link for his free ebook.

The success guru marketer doesn’t care. He’s got a million of you and a million more on tap. Out of that million he sometimes gets a sale for whatever garbage he’s peddling.

He can't operate without people to keep consuming his hopium. He can’t operate unless there are marks (victims, YOU).

To assist this he has his ropers and inside men who build trust in the mark (the fake comments).

That’s because the marketer has nothing of value to actually offer you so he has to distort reality in another direction, making you believe otherwise.

In all cases the marketer needs you, you don't need him.

The Marketer’s Tactics

So on Substack for example, he might wrap his crap up in Nietzsche quotes all day long to make it look like you're getting served something sophisticated —“that’s gonna rewire your brain man —guaranteed” instead of something utterly retarded. Instead of calling himself a life coach he may use new invented terms to confer sophistication on a gullible audience like “somatic coach”.

He might talk about his professional background —often as a businessman or a journalist, about how much he knows about success and finance. And in fact sometimes these Substacks may even seem to be about something superficially plausible : money, crypto, stocks, SEO and so on —Substack itself may even promote such content, but these topics have something in common; they are all essentially about nothing but the promise of success, the promise of you being rich, the author telling you about success and therefore qualify as the most base kind of online marketing.

We all want to hear we can be successful right ? We all just need that bit of advice to “unlock” our success, right ?

Apparently quite a lot of people are subscribing to this bullshit. Or are they ? Are these subs, likes and comments actually real ? (It’s a given some are fake accounts or ropers and inside men.)

I don’t know the percentages.

The explicit raw internet marketer may want to direct the real ones (you) to his paid posts, but his actual ‘product’ is his spammy useless affiliate links and his email list.

He wants to sell you ebooks, seminars, webinars, courses, upsells, referral sales and other useless junk that he will insert into your brain through the language of success.

What you don’t know is that he may actually run 10, 20 or 500 other Substacks, blogs, websites with the same or differently targeted marketing drivel.

He loves Substack because it gives him another way to get you on his mailing list, and the mailing list to marketers is everything. It’s their life blood. They cannot live without it.

Mailing Lists

And mailing lists are strange things.In principle they can have a perfectly benign purpose to keep people up to date and in contact with something they’re interested in.

But on regular websites they amount to a kind of opt-in junk mail.

Marketers lure you into what they call their sales funnel by offering you free stuff in exchange for your email address. You’ve probably noticed the annoying timed pop ups and pop overs that appear all the time. This practice has been normal for a long time and I think it sucks.

People often forget they signed up for something when they were interested in some topic and they carry on receiving these emails but hardly ever read them or send them to junk.

To me it seems crazy that people buy stupid crap they don’t need or even stuff they do need based on an email. I never have to my recollection, but apparently a tiny percentage do ‘convert’. So you need big numbers, big lists to make money.

But the hardcore success and referral sales marketer only knows marketing and if your email doesn’t bear fruit quickly enough he will look to extract value out of it in other ways. He may even try and get your phone number to start calling you about his “amazing opportunities for success in 2024”.

When you decline these generous offers because you haven’t got a spare 2-3k to do his seminar, he’ll then sell your email address and phone number to his “trusted third party partners” who will email and call you to sell you different lower tier products.

When that goes nowhere, the trusted third party partners will sell your email and phone number to anyone they want. Now all the bigger intended sells have long-failed and your details have ended up in the low-yield list you’ll be bombarded with “become a life coach” courses, pyramid schemes, penny stocks, wine stocks, erection pills, hair loss remedies, offers to invest in franchises, loan sharks, credit reports, and other sewer level crap.

In fact in many cases this happens from the outset.

You wanted success right ? This is what it looks like. This is what’s at the end of those Nietzsche quotes that will “rewire your brain man -guaranteed”.

Instead your inbox got rewired guaranteed, and if you were unlucky enough your wallet as well.

When I was younger even I got conned into a little bit of this, and I actually went to a couple of their free seminars they use to hone down their leads. And I found not every single person who goes is a moron or a loser, but the people who are smarter don’t come back again.

These schemes rely on an infinite supply of newbies, not seasoned people who know the game. Having said that I strongly suspect there are people dumb enough to keep getting pulled into this crud.

Facestacks

Right now, today, these people have flocked to Substack like flies around dog mess, in some ways taking advantage of an unusually sales-driven open platform.

They are telling you how to make money, how to make it big on Substack, and what a great platform it is.

But it would only take Mark Zuckerberg to create Facestacks, and then market it in such a way as to make it appear like the new cool thing and all these loyal Substack gurus will flock there instantly and start posting about “Why I’m switching to Facestacks”, “How to make 6-7 figures on Facestacks”, and that how “Facestacks is the future of writing”.

These same types were all over YouTube when it appeared, they were all over Facebook, Instagram, Linked-In and every other platform that had its moment as the latest hot thing at the time.

It’s a scam.

Stop being taken in by this crud.

The More Sophisticated Alternative Marketer

We should give a quick mention to some other types on Substack, like the more Sophisticated Online Marketer, who shifts his marketing away from the promise of success to other things.

This kind of marketer knows he isn’t going to be able to pull this crap off with a straight face, and that’s he’s too smart to produce this kind of drivel content and so he seeks other topics, new strategies and markets towards a slightly higher brow audience.

He relies on a slicker image to sell paid posts or promote a particular product or service, which he might get paid to do by sponsors that wish to capitalise on any authority he has built.

If he uses them at all, his utility of insiders and ropers will be more sophisticated and he may not have to get his hands dirty with it directly. He will be far cleverer in how he promotes his activity outside of Substack on Substack itself, while under the cloak of other topics he can make his own marketing appear far more benign.

But he wants the same things as the regular marketer and he shares the same concerns.

He doesn’t like any impediment to the flow of traffic and capital around his Substack page. What makes him a marketer rather than a writer is that he doesn’t actually write for the love of writing, despite what he may say. It’s a business to him.

Now and again, he may have some things of value to say for some people but like the explicit marketer you don’t need him. He needs you.

Personally I wouldn’t pay for his posts but that’s me. I would run a mile if he’s posting spammy links, whatever his education level.

The Less Sophisticated Alternative Marketer

However there are also less smart marketers that might want to push their marketing towards other topics but can’t hide it as well as the Sophisticated Marketer.

The Unsophisticated Marketer of other subjects tries to insert his marketing into topics other than ‘success’ too, but he can’t hide it as well.

He generates page after page of crap —that might have well been (or actually has been) produced by Chat GPT —although an AI would tend to do a better job, packed with low quality information, nonsensically written and loaded with a billion spam links to amazon referrals, other referrer sales dross, “free special reports”, surveys and other junk.

If he’s really dumb he will turn on the ‘pay to comment’ feature even though he has no valid content to comment on. I can’t even imagine paying to comment on a post, any post, no matter how great, let alone one that’s nothing but moron fake content and spam links.

The subject of fitness is a high-spam and marketer-saturated field on all platforms and it attracts a lot of Unsophisticated Marketers.

The inevitable effect of all this

Now finally, to come back to that point made at the top:

That the heavy presence of raw internet marketing is inevitably going to have an effect on regular writing on Substack.

There’s probably loads of capable writers in the world with something to say, but the idea they are all going to be earning 6-7 figures on Substack is nonsense. Substack’s business model kind of relies on creating incentives around this idea, but it’s nonsense.

So the temptation to market more is going to come into play. If you’re an unknown it’s not going to be enough to just write about your subject(s), you had better damn well be tweaking what you do to fit SEO, retention, clicks, “calls to action”, sign ups and so on to be competitive in this tough space. You may have to think moving towards subjects that are more popular.

(A quick aside here: Marketers will inevitably deny this as they will always talk about niches, but as already indicated— what marketers actually mean by niches is that they like to run 500 spammy substacks/blogs/websites on different niche topics.)

That means looking for reasons to push people into signing up for your paid posts as a business model, spammy manipulated titles, top 10 lists, ever dumber concepts and eventually when that fails, product “reviews” (i.e links to an amazon page with your referral code on it.)

Substack seems to contain within itself the potential seeds of its own destruction, where writing content is subject to massive deformation by market pressures its own model has created, then on top of that, heavily urged on by the success-bait internet marketers it also promotes.

The end result is SEO slush, clickbait sludge and referral-code-mud where eventually everything becomes indeterminable from explicit online marketing.

If this is the future of writing you can keep it.